NOTES for Mar 7:24-30

When we read in the Gospel that this woman was Syrophoenician, it does not mean that she was “second-class,” of the wrong origin, or had displeased Jesus in some other way. We know that the Savior is always ready to help and heal the poor, the sinful, and the rejected. The point is that she is a genuine pagan: she believes in pagan gods, worships them, and offers sacrifices. This is precisely why the Lord subjects her to such a trial of faith—to help her understand for herself why she is turning to Him for help rather than to her own gods.

A line is drawn here, as it were, between a person's pagan notions and an appeal to Jesus, that is, prayer. Prayer to Christ (and to the Father in Christ) is incompatible with paganism. Paganism does not necessarily mean belief in other gods; it also includes the hope, quite ordinary among many Christians, that is placed not in the one God but in something else: money, one's own abilities, one's political party, sheer luck, and so on. Paganism is living not for God but for someone else—for oneself, for example. If, while being pagans in this sense, we wish to ask Christ for something and turn to Him in prayer, we will have to undergo, together with this Canaanite woman, a complete reappraisal of our faith and understand why we have turned to Christ rather than to our idols...

The story of the healing of the Syrophoenician woman's daughter sometimes strikes the reader by the apparent harshness of the Savior's words addressed to the healed girl's mother. The comparison with a dog, unworthy of attention, really looks at least excessively harsh. Meanwhile, the woman's own reaction to this seeming harshness is quite calm.

Traditional exegesis explains what happens by the woman's deep repentance, her readiness to acknowledge any sin in herself if such acknowledgment will help her daughter. On closer examination, however, the dialogue between Jesus and the woman who turned to Him with a request for her daughter's healing resembles a parable more than anything else, a parable the woman understands and in whose language she answers the Savior. It may also be noted that the image of a dog as a symbol of uncleanness occurs in the Gospel text fairly often. This is not surprising: the Torah really does include the dog, like the pig, among unclean animals, and among all such animals these two were the ones Jesus' interlocutors and listeners most often saw.

Then Jesus' question takes on a definite meaning: does the clean person have the right to the Kingdom, while the unclean person, for example the same Gentile, does not? And the Syrophoenician woman was undoubtedly a Gentile. Can someone who has never known either purity or sanctification share in the Kingdom opened to the children of God, and all who belonged to the people of God were such children? And the woman, understanding the Savior perfectly, speaks of the crumbs that fall from the table. In essence, she accepts both Jesus Himself and the Kingdom He brought into the world. She accepts it while understanding that she herself has no right at all to this Kingdom that has come into the world. But she does not claim much either. She asks only for the smallest thing; the faintest reflection of the Kingdom's light is enough for her, enough for her daughter's healing. And she receives what she asks, receives it as an undeserved gift that she could not have expected in any way.

Thus the question of the people of God and the Gentiles is resolved in relation to the Kingdom. The one who asserts his rights to this Kingdom will have to prove the rights he has asserted; he will have to correspond to what he has claimed. But to the one who claims nothing, understanding that he has no rights to anything, the Kingdom will be given freely, on one condition: his humility must be genuine. It can only be, to use philosophical language, an existential choice for the one asking, and not at all a tribute to politeness, even religious politeness. Thus the Kingdom reconciles all: both those who feel their own strength and those who feel weak and unworthy of what they seek. It reconciles them by the love that both the strong and the weak need equally.

The words Christ spoke to the Syrophoenician woman sound very troubling: "...it is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." As if He were supporting xenophobia and superiority over people of another faith as second-class people. But let us put ourselves in this woman's place. Suppose we are asking Christ for some mercy, and He answers us: "I have no time; I am busy distributing deserved mercies to the lawful children of God, and you are a dog; you are not allowed to eat from the master's table." Most of us would be indignant and would answer that "these children of Yours are no better than I am, and as for my being a dog, name-calling is rude." But this woman, with astonishing humility, agrees and says: "You may think of me whatever You consider necessary; I really am a sinner. But could not even crumbs of Your mercy fall to me?"

Crumbs, because from her point of view, the healing of her daughter is such a small thing for the Almighty that it would hardly impoverish the children showered with the Creator's endless mercies. And such humility before Christ does not remain unanswered.

And one more important point: Christ does not refuse to help her, a pagan woman, but in order for this to become possible, she needs to agree that the truth is contained in faith in the one God. The Jews, as monotheists, accept this truth, while pagans do not. After all, if the Syrophoenician woman does not agree that this is truly so, then who is Jesus for her?

Today the evangelist for the first time draws our attention to the fact that Jesus heals not only Jews but also representatives of other peoples who lived in the lands surrounding Palestine. In this case the daughter of a woman called "Syrophoenician" is in view. In the New Testament this is what residents of the Phoenician cities, Tyre and Sidon, are called. These cities are located in the territory of present-day central Lebanon. The modern name of Sidon is Saida.

At first glance, Jesus' treatment of the woman who turned to Him for help seems too harsh: today we perceive comparing a person to a dog as humiliation and insult. Yet in those days and in the setting in which the Savior's earthly ministry took place, His phrase sounded somewhat different. In those days there could be no talk at all of universal equality or equal rights for everyone. This also concerned, among other things, the equality of people before God: for a Jew, for example, every pagan was in this respect a second-class person, since he did not belong to the people of God and, as a rule, did not think about God. Even those representatives of pagan peoples who were interested in Judaism and came to synagogues to listen to the reading of Scripture and the sermon, as did happen, were still not considered equal by Jews. Full equality required becoming a Jew all the way: being circumcised, beginning to observe all religious rules, in a word, completely changing one's way of life. Those who did not do this were considered ritually unclean by Jews, the same as unclean animals, among which they included dogs.

By comparing the woman who came to Him with a dog, Jesus evidently means only to tell her that the Kingdom of God, which she wants to touch, and without such a touch no healing is possible, is given first of all to the "children," that is, to the Jews as the people of God, and only afterward to everyone else. When the woman agrees to this order of things, she receives what she asks for just as those who belong to the people of God do. In this way the evangelist points out that the Kingdom of God, which Jesus brought into the world, is open to everyone, whether Jew or pagan.

In this story it is very interesting why Mark decided to preserve the Aramaic word "ephphatha." Usually the evangelist gives Aramaic words either when they were well known to his listeners, or when they said a great deal to them and to him personally. In particular, Mark preserves not only the Lord Jesus' address to the Father, "Abba," and His words of God-forsakenness on the cross, but also His words addressed to those whom He healed: for example, to Jairus's daughter, "talitha, cumi," and today, to the deaf man. Why was the word "ephphatha" so precious to the evangelist? Perhaps he felt that it was, in some measure, addressed not only to the deaf man, but also to everyone who recognizes his own deafness, the closedness of his heart and spiritual hearing, and his inability to hear and understand the Word addressed to him. This means that today the Lord, in His native language, addresses all who want healing, all who want to live His life and follow His way, and says: "Ephphatha, be opened..."

The Savior's words that nothing entering the mouth can defile a person are sometimes interpreted to mean that there is nothing in the world that is unclean in itself, and that nothing can harm a person except what comes out of his own heart. Yet Jesus is speaking about why nothing entering the mouth can defile a person: it passes through the person and is thereby cleansed. This statement, strange at first glance, turns out to be quite logical if we keep in mind the second part of the explanation, which speaks about what comes out of the heart. It presupposes that if a person's heart stops spewing into the world everything the Savior lists, then nothing unclean will be able to defile him.

Of course, Jesus speaks about uncleanness not in the sense of sinfulness, but in the sense in which the Torah speaks about it: as a special kind of psychophysiological and spiritual state that hinders communion with God and obstructs sanctification. It is in this sense that certain kinds of food are called unclean, or non-kosher, in the Torah. They are not bad in themselves, but they are not suitable for a person who wants to live a full spiritual life.

Perhaps this was so before the coming into the world of the Messiah, who brought the Kingdom with Him. The Kingdom is where the concepts of cleanness and uncleanness truly become irrelevant, because the fullness of relationship with God there is completely different and cannot be compared with what existed before.

For a resident of the Kingdom, nature remains nature. Until a person's full transfiguration, his physiology remains what it was before. But it no longer has the same influence on a person's spiritual state that it once had. The process of digestion no longer interferes in spiritual life. On one condition: if the heart is pure and no filth comes from it. Just as it should be for a resident of the Kingdom.